SHMUP: It’s A Shmup

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This looks like my kind of thing. My kind of thing being “games that make me feel like I’m incredibly good at games, even though I’m not.” IGF China finalist S.H.M.U.P. is, as the name suggests, a side-scrolling shooter. But! Rather than being a precision game of exhausting bullet-dodging, it’s one in which you unleash a sustained torrent of improbable explodey-death, with your avatar eventually consisting of a fleet of up to 15 ships. In other words, Press Button, Watch Everything Explode. Yay!
There’s a demo out now, which I’ll be firing up happily tomorrow (most of today having been lost to Windows 7 deciding that it’s entirely unnecessary for me to have any kind of GUI in my operating system, and that a black screen with a cursor on it is enough. Thanks, Windows 7), and the full game’s just gone on sale for ten of your American dollars. The trailer below is enough to have me thinking “fun!”, though I’ll admit I’m not sure about the look.

I hope that the full game keeps upping the ante, because that ‘boss’ there looked rather tame, sadly.

The modern shmup is generally a exercise in self-improvement. Yeah, you have infinite continues and can ‘beat’ the game in half an hour, but you’ll do so with a tiny, tiny score. Why? Because each time you continue, that score goes back to zero.

Thus, you challenge yourself, entirely on your own terms. You get further each try, you do better, you pull off combos and strings that you hadn’t thought possible, and then you die and have that crushing choice of sacrificing your score and trying to beat that part, or just accepting defeat and starting fresh.

If this game has a scoring system that captures that spirit of entirely self-motivated improvement, then it’ll have captured the spirit of the genre.

As for a commerical shooter that embodies the ‘Press button, everything explodes’ mentality, you’ll be wanting Jets N’ Guns: link to jng.rakeingrass.com

Take Tyrian (ye olde shareware classic), turn it horizontal-style (oo-err, missus!), add a streak of bizarre eastern european humor, and about a hojillion weapons that just spray the screen with firepower. It also has a rather cool High-Res Amigaish aesthetic and a fantastic soundtrack by chiptune-meets-metal band Machinae Supremacy.

Bweh? Aside from a couple of rare instances where they’re directly blocking your path, I can’t think of any part of the game where you have to shoot crates. There’s a lot of buildings and scenery that you can destroy for a little extra money, but they’re not what’s shooting at you.

SPACE crates. Jets n guns is probably the best shrump I’ve played in years. Tbh, criticising it for being unoriginal is kind of missing the point, it’s a dumbass shooter with sexy graphics, tons of guns and varied, interesting levels.

It’s sexy, it’s fun, it’s great in the sack. Granted I wouldn’t marry it, but… yeah. It’s still the best shoot em up I’ve played lately.

To be honest, I don’t really go looking for originality in shooters – in fact, most of the time I’ll value “how wot it plays” over any innovation or originality. JnG though, I dunno – it’s hard to know where to start with it.

Most of the time you’re in one of two states – ridiculously underpowered or ridiculously overpowered and inbetween the cosmetic destruction, it’s multi-hit baddie after multi-hit baddie and little else there. I brought the space crate example up because I’m not sure what kind of person when putting together a shooter thinks “oh yeah, what we need is a ‘you need to shoot x crates’ level now” y’know?

It just feels like a checklist of things thrown in without any care as to whether they work -well- or not, at its best it appears to do the job, at its worst it’s a tedious experience for me.

I should clarify that I don’t really fall into the “want complex scoring or a curtain of bullets” camp for the most part, although I do occasionally dip my toe into that sort of thing, I just like a more designed experience.

There’s a wealth of better (and in many cases cheaper or free) shooters out there I’d recommend over JnG anyday.

O shmups how i love thee. This genre still keeps to the old ways, where games were short, replaying meant improving your skills, mechanics provided (in good games) various levels of challenge, tiny hitboxes make you feel cool and things go boom! I’ve done quite a bit of research into this malarky ….self promo… link to nullpointer.co.uklink to nullpointer.co.uk
Theres a purity of mechanics in shmups that is sadly being lost in our aspirations to ‘play movies’